Baby Kittens! 13 Days Old!

baby kitten yawning

King of the kitten pile? Or just a yawn?

baby kitten sleeping

At this age all they do is sleep and eat, and then sleep and eat some more.

baby kittens

Such a pretty little face…

13-day-old kittens

I’ve gotten a few questions about how these were shot… Was it a “normal” camera? And the answer is yes! Just a normal camera and a 50mm lens at f/1.2. If you’ve studied photography even just a little, you probably know that an aperture of f/1.2 will give you an extremely shallow depth of field – but then when you combine it with shooing this close, it makes the field of focus even more narrow. On some of these only the tiny little whiskers on their noses were in focus. I did crop all of them slightly – but no more that a quarter of the image was trimmed off. But did I do anything to them in PhotoShop? Not really. I color balanced and then sharpened them, but there was no selective blurring, or anything else tricky. These really are the way it looks when you shoot wide open, and really close up.

So why did I choose to shoot this way? There are several reasons. One, I think it’s pretty. Two, I really wanted to focus on the kitten’s tiny little toes and their noses and whiskers. The narrow focus serves to isolate those features from the background, and really showcase how sweet they are. And three, I like to push occasionally, and get something a little different. Shooting the same subject the same way, more than once, gets a little boring. Gotta shake it up!

Kittens! Year Three…

ten-day-old kittens

Kiss, kiss!

baby kitten

Ten-days-old…

baby calico kittens

Little kitten faces

Little faces, ten-days-old…

When do kittens open their eyes?

This is the LAST generation of this particular cat family. The mother of these kittens is one of the kittens from last summer – in other words, she’s only nine-months old herself – but now that she’s letting me touch her, she’ll be on her was to the Vet to get fixed, as soon as these babies are weaned. Her brother has already visited the Vet, and she’s the last hold-out, so definitely the last branch of this particular cat family tree!